Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 26, 2012 @09:29AM
from the market-laws-are-like-physical-laws dept.

jfruh writes "Comcast customers who dream of superfast download speeds drooled when they heard the company would be offering 305 Mbps service. There's only one catch: the high speeds are only available in markets where the cable giant is going head-to-head with Verizon's FiOS service. It seems that competition really does improve service quality when it comes to ISPs."

Subject to their terms of service - and whims. And they will reinstate the caps after the suckers sign on for a few years. Come on, we've seen this so many times now, we know how the heroin trade works. First shot is free, then the price goes up forever after they are the only game(s) in town.

Dear AC: The article you linked has NO relevance to the Comcast v. FiOS competition and increase of rates to 305 Mbit/s.The article you linked is old news (May) and about usage-based billing ($/gigabyte) in two test cities and a completely-separate issue from the ultrafast internet Comcast is introducing to fight FiOS.

Write off's only save you whatever you would have paid in taxes on that money. You've still spent the money. It's not like write off's magically pay for themselves. Given the fact that business lines are significantly more expensive and the fact that you can write off a consumer line there's not really a point.

Never happy.Comcast is offering 300 Mbit/s which is faster than Sweden or Japan's national average (~20 Mbit/s), and yet still you complain. This rollout will put my state Maryland, which is almost exclusively Comcast territory, in the top 10 fastest of all EU or US states.And all you can do is complain.Personally it makes me happy.

If an 'offer' is made that cannot possibly be used by anyone, it is no offer, it's a gimmick.Blistering fast networking for an hour followed by being disconnected, charged out the wazoo or throttled to dialup speed for the rest of the month is worse than useless. You'd actually be better off with 1/10th the download speed so you would have time to realize you were about to burn a whole month's allotment.

Broadband providers COULD provide reasonable and worry free service by setting a committed rate per custo

Not that I like Comcast but how exactly do you expect Comcast to do that when the average speed is highly dependent on the ever changing network utilization? The only thing they can really guarantee is peak rate and the bare minimum.

Power companies do not sell you average, the voltage is not variable in a meaningful way through-out the day. Brown and black outs are rare enough events these days.

Water is about the same, it doesn't vary in a meaningful way for residential users. Then again I don't live on a street where everyone has lawn sprinklers, let alone all turns them on at the same time as each other...

I do. The government-owned water company drains to a trickle whenever the local business is on lunch break. And brownouts (too many people and not enough electricity) are not unheard of during summer months. Water/electric is really no different than internet, where they are unable to meet peak demand.

Yes. After a few years, they were as reliable as they are now. They were not operated by financialists trying to game the system by pretending they had to short your water supply because, well, just because gobbledygook yak yak yak. They built the damned pipes and people got enough water. Same with power.

They did what they did because they were regulated monopolies that were required to plough profits back into their infrastructure instead of being free to drain those profits into outside ventures and their

So you would say the the old AT&T monopoly was a success? And the massive explosion of services and technologies after the breakup was just a coincidence? The Post Office always used to claim that overnight delivery was not practical, until private companies started doing it.
I would agree that the current 'private profit, public loss' model is a sack of crapola. But a semi-open trading market on top of a layer of bailed out monopolies isn't what I would call a free market.

You measure success in new services. Your grandparents (assuming you are an American and your family not recent immigrants) measured success as universal access to telephone service (and water, and electricity). That universal access to mobile devices and internet exists in a country as vast as the U.S. is precisely because that early telephone infrastructure existed. That "crapola" is what made this country great and gives us access to resources in even the most sparsely populated areas.

Your grandparents (assuming you are an American and your family not recent immigrants) measured success as universal access to telephone service (and water, and electricity).

And more importantly, they measured it in being able to get something fixed when it was broken. Before the divestiture, when you had a phone problem you called the phone company to fix it. It was their wire, their phone, their long distance, their everything.

After the divestiture, you needed to know if your trouble was close (in your own equipment), local (between the demarc and the CO), or long distance, and who you called to fix it, if there was someone you could call, depended on where the problem was.

Is is just me, or are we all a little sick of people saying "Because..." and then adding adding a stupid statement that they don't believe, thinking this actually supports or even proves an unstated position which they're too cool to actually articulate. This is lazy internet hipster sophistry, and it's been done to death, people. At least back in 1999 it was amusing, but it's never been rhetorically useful. If you have a point, state it. If think you actually have a proof by contradiction, then lose the i

It's a bluff. It annoys me, too. Another thing that annoys me is the phrase, "I would argue," which is a claim to expertise that the person probably very rarely actually possesses. You would argue? Please. You couldn't find your own ass in the dark with both hands. What you really mean is that it suddenly occurred to you, and therefore must be correct.

This "because.." kind of argumentation also forces the other guy to basically guess what you meant and to respond on that basis. Meanwhile, I can si

Or you can spend money on water pipes instead of football stadiums or CEO stock options and pay. There is no "shortage" of power, water, or internet capacity. There is simply an incentive not to build or maintain infrastructure, because when scarcity occurs, you can raise prices. Scare = expensive. Come on Enron was ten years ago, you all still remember. They throttled power and raised prices to make lots and lots and LOTS of money. It was a scam. There was enough power.

And in rare cases, such as a small town in the middle of nowhere, or an area in a drought, there really isn't enough water. Too many people, unsustainable landscape. Those people should move. Canada is full of water. The world's population lives next to free water. Go where the water is. Droughts will increase in severity, and we aren't going to see the end of those.

But internet? The cost of the "pipes" and "water" is tiny, and shrinking constantly. There is no incentive to build past an optimum scarcity/profit intersection. They want to raise prices. And we, being free market fundamentalists, believe their lies. Hell, THEY believe their own lies.

The water and power companies don't need to throttle users because the users throttle their own usage. Why do they do that? Because they PAY by usage, not flat rate. Until it is common for power and water companies to provide flat-rate service you can't compare ISPs to them.

Also, it is wrong to think of things like water as 'max speed' all the time, because it just isn't true. If, for instance, you have an automatic lawn irrigation system you may find that some days your coverage is correct, other days

"The 2000 Insight ranks as the most efficient United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) certified gasoline-fueled vehicle ever, with a highway rating of 61 miles per US gallon (3.9 L/100 km; 73 mpg-imp) and combined city/highway rating of 53 miles per US gallon (4.4 L/100 km; 64 mpg-imp)".

That's not how it works. You are only throttled when you exceed more than 10% of a given plant's line capacity in comparison to other subscribers. Remember, HFC with DOCSIS is a shared network medium, not a switched network medium, so it's not hard for one customer to actively diminish the experience of other users. For example if there are 10 timeslots available and user A is using 90% of them despite other users, those other users will begin to notice increased latency in any data they transmit. This also

You're fastest connection based on the slowest link. How can you hold Comcast to an average access speed when you don't have a reliable metric of the average access speed of the websites and media services you're trying to access?

Competition not only improves quality, but it's the only reason this is being deployed at all. Providers' repeated claims that they should be allowed to merge because they'd innovate anyway is now demonstrated yet again to be utter bullshit.

As long as they actually compete in the same space, delivering to the same customers. If you just slice up a big monopoly you only get a bunch of mini-monopolies, it really doesn't make much of a difference. My impression is that with exclusivity agreements most people in the US live in some form of mini-monopoly or mini-duopoly even if they're with a small ISP..

i'm at 10-15 now and going down to 5 once i cancel cable and go a la carte cable internet. 3-5 megabits is enough to stream netflix and amazon.

a lot cheaper to let steam update at night than to pay for super fast internet too

It depends on what you do with your home internet. If all you do is some Netflix streaming and web surfing then 3-5 down is plenty and your upload speed really won't matter.
I work from home myself so I typically get the fastest internet speed I can. I don't need super fast internet all the time, but when I'm moving a lot of data between my home office and the main office I can see the difference and it affects my working day. More-so with upload speed than download speed. I've currently got a 50/5 pac

If you work from home, that often means moving large amounts of work data back and forth. It's common for me to want to grab a 40MB chunk of data on short notice and be blocked on work until it comes down. At that point, 25Mb (13 seconds) is way better than 5Mb (65 seconds, you're likely to go read webcomics and so forth). 300Mb would be 1s, which is _really_ good because it doesn't interrupt your workflow at all.

I don't need it - I just want it. I have 60/60 today and going up from 25/5 was pure luxury, but it's the whole "there's plenty bandwidth for everything, all the time no matter how much I'm doing at once" and it cuts down on all download waiting times. For example if I suddenly decide to play an old game Steam has the nasty habit of telling me there's a new huge required patch and I can't play until it's downloaded. With 60 Mbit that's maybe 5 minutes of waiting instead of 60 minutes with 5 Mbit. It's caref

I just finally upgraded from a DOCSIS 1.1 modem to a DOCSIS 3 modem because the 10MBit it allowed wasn't quite enough. I now get roughly 2x that throughput, depending (I'm on a 35Mbit/5Mbit line). I work from home, my wife is a stay-at-home mom, and my 3 children are Internet-capable home schoolers, and the throughput is more than sufficient for concurrent streaming of media (2x netflix + multiple pandora, at times) while doing other things.

You must live somewhere with seasonal snow, then. RAV4/CRV are the Prius/I don't do anything but commute vehicles for places with snow. Ironically, I've seen a fairly large number of Priuses in the area of late (where the CRV/RAV4 are historically predominant for such idiots).

In California, you can fairly accurately predict erratic behavior and poor driving ability by the type of car they're driving. Priuses win, but BMWs and anything between those two types of vehicles are invariably the worst. Toy SUVs li

Up here in Minnesota the worst are the people with the big full size trucks and SUVs with 4WD, auto 4WD, and AWD. They think they are invincible in them and even though they have "twice the traction" forget that twice the traction of almost nothing when on ice is still almost nothing and they end up in ditches or hitting trees and other stuff. Things like traction control and auto 4WD/AWD seem to have made things worse as now it just means that they don't need to think when they drive. Granted I have a spor

I'm o.k. with Netflix quality (sure, could be a lot better), but the audio compression in the commercials on Hulu is nearly enough to make my ears bleed. Not so bad if using the TV's speakers, but on Bose... blech.

I don't think anyone doubted that competition between ISPs improves service. The question is more about whether there is *enough* competition, or even whether there could ever be enough.

Right now, in most places, there's a duopoly if you're lucky. Where I live, in NYC, I have no real choice. It's basically Time Warner Cable or dial-up. In order to have a robust market, I'd say you need at least 5 real ISPs going head-to-head, but you would never be able to get 5 different companies to lay down 5 different and independent infrastructures in my neighborhood.

So it makes sense that Comcast isn't even bothering to roll this out except where they're competing with FIOS. So, absent competition, what do we do?

Of course this is only available where it absolutely needs to be; where they're being hammered from competition. Meanwhile, other markets are left to be price-gouged as long as possible. This only proves that they have the ability to upgrade the network, they just won't until they're dragged kicking and screaming. Of course many businesses have that attitude, but it isn't often so obviously apparent as in this case.

Seriously, it's not like ISPs are some of the most profitable businesses in the world (and even if they were, that's still good as it would attract capital). Keeping a competitive price is probably just what they have to do to minimize losses, until they can find a better solution.

So you think it's perfectly reasonable to be charged $70/mo for what CenturyLink is calling 1.5mbit DSL (speed tests show closer to 756k)? I'm sure my parents would love something cheaper, but the only other options are dial-up for $20-30/mo, or satellite w/dial-up uplink for roughly the same price as they pay for almost-broadband.

If that's not price gouging...

(Oh, another fun fact regarding their situation: CenturyLink currently has no plans to upgrade the area, as per their local coordinator in charge of

Amazing what a little competition can do. It was never about them being unable to bring people these speeds, or it being cost prohibitive...they just don't want to spend the fucking money until they're losing more customers than they're signing up in a given quarter. I've had techs from my ISP, Charter Communications, basically tell me that my local node is way oversaturated due to this being a very densely populated area, and that the main hardware is complete crap, but that corporate isn't going to upgrade until the amount they're spending on service calls exceeds the cost of upgrading the node. You know it's fucked up when the company's own fucking techs are exasperated enough to start telling customers shit like that...

Yeah, I try to go the UVerse route as well (I check every couple months or so) and they're not in my area yet, either (but they do cover people a few blocks from my house on the other side of a major roadway...I can see them doing their installs from my driveway as the tears of envy and bitterness spill down my cheeks). Verizon FiOS has also been rumored to be coming in here for years now and they still haven't shown up, either.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've had someone tell me of a posit

Yet, amazingly, when competitors come in the service miraculously improves? Boy, that's not coincidental or anything...

When a company is granted a local monopoly on service, they should no longer get to treat all issues purely in terms of dollars and cents. If they can't keep up with the current pace of technology, then they do not deserve their monopoly and the lines need to be opened up to those that can so we have a truly competitive market. They can't fucking have it both ways.

So we can reach our bandwidth cap in, what, five minutes? Unless it is a Genuine Comcast Internet Content, of course - bandwidth doesn't seem to matter then.

Fastest to the finish line is useless when the finish line is five feet away from the starting line.

Munis should build the infrastructure and operate as non-profits. Shut the telecoms and cable conglomerates down - they are bringing the internet age to a grinding crawl. Internet isn't cable, and it should't be operated for a profit any more than the street system.

Because people don't want 5 different ISPs with 5 different lines going down their street. Local infrastructure for telecom, cable, water, electricity, gas, etc is a "natural monopoly". I don't care if the government or a private company owns/manages the wires in the ground, but the one company I do NOT want managing the wires in the ground is my ISP. I want a company with no incentive whatsoever to give preferential treatment to one ISP over another.

I'm not sure letting local governments run the infrastructure is much better. For example, I can imagine many cities (especially in the US Southeast) would censor the hell out of the connection, and you think the cable/phone companies give the police a lot of access to the network for monitoring? Imagine what would happen if the PD and the infrastructure people have the same boss.

If this package is indeed capped, it is just as stupid and sad as the 5GB caps on 4G wireless data plans.

If my sleepy math is right, you reach the old 250GB cap in a little less than 2 hours and the rumored new 300GB cap in a little over 2 hours. If they stick with the proposed 10$ per 50GB overage charge, you can enjoy paying about $25/hr to use your 305Mb/s connection after the first 2 hours.

Internet isn't cable, and it should't be operated for a profit any more than the street system.

An analogy with highway tolls comes to mind, and it scares me. Highway tolls can get diverted to other public works projects [boston.com]. Government could gouge us for Internet access just as easily as a private monopoly could, and I am sure they would think of all kinds of "wonderful" uses for that new revenue.

But with Fios, the weird thing is you often get even higher speeds than they advertise... and in general you actually get the speeds you SHOULD be getting. So long as the website/server you're accessing can handle it.

Comcast though: we hardly ever got that close to what they promised. And DSL... we were usually in the same boat as you: averaging 80% of their promised speeds.

But since we went to FIOS, I'm actually content with the speeds we're getting.

Comcast competes with Verizon in my area and their prices are essentially identical.

When Verizon said they were going to come in to my area, the head honcho explicitly states they were not going to compete on price. And they haven't.

If Comcast really wants to compete with Verizon they would lower their prices while increasing their speeds. As we have seen on several articles here, the U.S. ranks at the top of the industrialized world for cost of broadband and almost at the bottom for speed of broadband.

At this point, I feel that internet speed is more than fast enough for most of my purposes. My FIOS subscription was just upgraded from 15 Mbps to 75 Mbps without any additional cost, but I would have preferred to stay at 15 Mbps at a reduced price. Unfortunately, the sales person claims that they only offer speed upgrades for the same price, but there is no option for paying less. For those that want the extra speed, I think it's great that options like this are available (at least in limited markets), but for those who don't need the speed it would be nice to have a more reasonably priced option. It's funny how telecommunications seems to be the one sector where improvements in technology never result in cheaper prices. I guess that's what happens when companies are granted local monopolies.

There's no reason for Verizon to cater to your desire to keep speed Y fixed and have $X fluctuate.

Since there's virtually no competition in this market, you are absolutely correct. At this point, their only objective is to be slightly less shitty than the little competition they have and they are barely pulling that off.

Now we see why they fight so hard not to have to compete. Rolling out new equipment is hard, buying a cable monopoly from the local government is easy, and you can charge $40/month for the same crap service forever.

The news from me to that ArsTechnica article is that Verizon is no longer pursuing FIOS, either. They haven't sold it, and they're still running it, but they're not pushing new rollouts, either.

I got Comcast cable long before DSL became available to me. Recently/. ran a story on the "National Broadband Map" that led me to believe that a local CLEC would be an option for me. But somewhere between my house and the CO, there

That's what I heard as well... but then last month or so they announced their "Quantum" FIOS service which offers packages up to 300MBit. So... I don't know if they reversed their decision (again) or are just opening up the pipes they already laid (and are still not laying more).

I have 100Mbps service with Charter and find that many (most?) sites cannot or do not deliver content at that speed. Some clearly do (like Steam), so I know I am getting 100Mbps service, but for the most part this speed doesn't "feel" much faster than the 40Mbps I had before.

I read the announcement yesterday and that just isn't accurate. What they are doing is doubling the speeds of their top 3 internet tiers 25 to 50, 50 to 100, and 100 to 300. It will happen in every docsis 3 area they are just doing it in the northeast FIRST.

What legal purpose would 300 Mbps to the household serve for most people? I am a FIOS customer, but I have it provisioned at the minimum bandwidth for cost reasons. Nevertheless, I can work from home, my wife and kid can do Netflix (two different tvs) all at the same time, and I can torrent the latest version of CentOS in less time than it takes to hunt up a disc to burn it to. These monstrous bandwidths are, for an overwhelming percentage of the population (or even an overwhelming percentage of geeks) only for bragging rights. Not to actually use. It's just a faster way to slam up against Comcast throttling.

I was a charter customer of FIOS. What it buys me is (1) investing in a higher tech medium which I still believe is the wave of the future (fiber to the home) and (2) (this is important) I don't have to deal with Comcast customer support.

And... I have to add (3) it's fun to watch the Comcast monthly door-to-door salesperson go all wonky when we tell them we're sticking with FIOS. Although, I haven't seen him since I reported him for yelling at my wife the last time.

Ahh, Comcast. If any company deserved to by purchased and dismantled, it would be you.

The problem with talks about competition is this: in order to trigger the sort of competition that caused Comcast to make this move is that you need someone to make the massive infrastructure investment necessary to lay the fiber, build the system, etc. Even if you freed up a market, there are not a lot of investors who have the money and experience. Assuming you find an investor, there are probably only a limited number of markets that have the sufficient population density to make it a profitable ventur

Municipalities are the only possible solution for laying cheap, no-profit fiber to everyone's homes. They do it with water and power; exactly as you say, private water and power companies wouldn't cut it - too much outlay for too little return. That's why the Tennessee Valley Authority did what Edison wouldn't. No munis, no gigabit for everyone.

[Posted at 02:58 PM ET, 12/08/2011] And even though [Verizon Chief Executive Lowell McAdam] insisted that Verizon will rigorously promote its FiOS video and Internet service in areas that compete with cable, the company said it doesn't have plans to expand the expensive fiber network beyond what's already been announced and schedu

Exactly. Something upstream will either be slower or will have traffic congestion and keep your transfer rates well below 100Mbps. It's marketing drivel that everyone pays for because of useless network upgrades.